isoHunt loses big: infringement “old wine in a new bottle”

The man behind isoHunt may be facing a host of legal sanctions, as a judge has …

The movie studies have won another major legal victory in the ongoing war against file sharing, this one against an individual (Gary Fung) who ran a number of torrent search sites, including the popular isoHunt. Although the defendant had argued he was providing just another search engine, the judge has ruled that Fung's legal team had neglected to rebut the studio's primary arguments, and Fung himself had a history of statements showing that he encouraged copyright infringement. Although the ruling establishes liability, there's no word yet on the sanctions that Fung will face.

Granting a summary judgement requires that the judge interpret all the arguments in favor of the losing party, and still find that their opponents have made a winning case, so it's a pretty difficult standard to meet. Fung and his lawyers, however, seem to have made the job a bit easier.

"The material facts supporting Plaintiffs' claims are almost wholly unrebutted," the judge Stephen Wilson ruled. "Generally, Defendants' rest their case on legal arguments and meritless evidentiary objections, and offer little of their own evidence that directly addressed Plaintiffs’ factual assertions."

So, for example, the studios brought in expert witnesses to argue that a statistical sampling of the content and server logs showed that nearly all of the content infringed copyrights, and about half of the downloads were made within the US. The defendants dismissed statistical sampling as "junk science," but didn't bother bringing in any sort of expert witness to explain why it wasn't a valid approach, or wasn't widely accepted by statisticians. (Admittedly, it is widely accepted, so this would have been hard.)

The arguments that Fung's sites were just another search engine that happened to pick up copyrighted content were torpedoed by a combination of the sites themselves and Fung's own words. Evidence was introduced that the search code was specifically tuned to find copyrighted material: "Defendant Fung additionally directs the program to specific web pages containing terms like 'seinfeld-videos,' which one would infer contains infringing content from the television show Seinfeld." One of his sites also displayed a list of the top-20 grossing movies in the US, with links to copies of each, while another had categories that included "High Quality DVD Rips" and "TV Show Releases."

Fung caused problems for himself via his blog, which contained entries questioning whether copyright infringement was really theft, and offered advice on how to find movies and prepare the files for burning to DVDs. He also admitted to using his own site to obtain episodes of Lost, The Simpsons, and The Lord of the Rings.

As a result, Judge Wilson dismissed the search engine arguments as little more than a distraction, and treated the case as if it were the son of Grokster. "Defendants' technology is nothing more than old wine in a new bottle," Wilson wrote, elsewhere noting that "The Fung sites are an evolutionary modification of traditional 'peer-to-peer' sharing sites such as Napster and Grokster." (Designed might be more accurate, although the degree of intelligence involved is a bit questionable.)

Fung's lawyers were even schooled for using an argument that the Supremes had explicitly rejected in the Grokster case.

So, Fung's sites were clearly being used for infringement, Fung himself was fully aware of it, and legal precedent pretty clearly indicates that the sites meet the criteria established for inducing infringement.

The last hurdle for a summary judgement seemed to be the Fung team's argument that a lot of the content on the sites was automatically generated in response to user queries, and thus should fall under the DMCA's safe harbor provision, which absolves service providers from liability for content posted by their users. That, however, ignores the text of the safe harbor provision itself, which Judge Wilson quotes: "upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness [of infringing material], acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material." Fung did nothing of the sort.

It's not clear whether Fung intends to appeal, but any appeal would have to deal with the legal record in the case, and the decision makes it clear that there's a huge body of unrebutted evidence that will be difficult to overcome. All that seems to be left at this point is a decision on sanctions. The judge has scheduled a status conference for the case in early January.

47 Reader Comments

Seems pretty cut and dry. He infringed and induced infringement. People like Gary Fung should be the ones with the hundreds of thousands of dollar fines, not Thomas-Rasset(he probably would have won if he and his lawyer were not so incompetent)

Torrent sites beware: if you are based in the US you will probably get busted.

Granting a summary judgement requires that the judge interpret all the arguments in favor of the losing party, and still find that their opponents have made a winning case,

Say what? There are two criteria for summary judgement:

(1) there must be no genuine issues of material fact, and

(2) the movant must be entitled to judgment as a matter of law.

Finding in favor of the losing party would mean a trial is necessary.

I had to read that sentence several times before I understood what was being said.

It might be more understandable as; "Granting a summary judgement requires that the judge interpret all the arguments that favor the position of the losing party, and still find that their opponents have made a winning case,"

Why does it seem that these guys (Fung, Tenenbaum) always seem to get the amateur lawyers. When the judge rebukes you for not even addressing the points in the complaint, it's not going to look good for your client.

Originally posted by zimdba:Why does it seem that these guys (Fung, Tenenbaum) always seem to get the amateur lawyers. When the judge rebukes you for not even addressing the points in the complaint, it's not going to look good for your client.

because all the sane ones see a tar pit a mile away and stays well away...

basically, this is all a argument over views of the world, much like religion. And just as religion, it can be argued forever, and never find a consensus. And that there is a whole lot of potential money at stake makes it a so much more polarized argument...

Originally posted by zimdba:Why does it seem that these guys (Fung, Tenenbaum) always seem to get the amateur lawyers. When the judge rebukes you for not even addressing the points in the complaint, it's not going to look good for your client.

Because no reputable lawyer would take these cases to trial.Thomas could have settled, and paid a fraction of the amount she now owes. Any ethical lawyer (oxymoron?) would have recommended this course of action, given the overwhelming evidence of her guilt.

Having used the site... yeah, it's pretty much cut and dry that it's specifically geared towards infringement (as it has been currently defined). Some results even appeared with the special phrase "IsoHunt Release", seeming to indicate that the site was actively participating. TPB had decent arguments as all they did was sit back and let others provide the links. It's too bad, because I always liked IsoHunt for trying out software and such forth before I bought it, but that's the reality.

Its amazing how effective this global effort has been. A few years ago whenever I'd do a search on a given piece of media, in the first few hits would be a torrent or other download, and usually half the hits on the first page of the search results were some form of illegal download. Nowadays I would have to explicitly seek out a torrent, and even then they are harder and harder to find.

Does piracy still exist? Of course, and it likely always will. But these campaigns have been amazingly effective at knocking it out of the hands of the casual internet user, and taking it out of sight of the general public. Which was the aim all along.

Originally posted by reflex-croft:Its amazing how effective this global effort has been. A few years ago whenever I'd do a search on a given piece of media, in the first few hits would be a torrent or other download, and usually half the hits on the first page of the search results were some form of illegal download. Nowadays I would have to explicitly seek out a torrent, and even then they are harder and harder to find.

Does piracy still exist? Of course, and it likely always will. But these campaigns have been amazingly effective at knocking it out of the hands of the casual internet user, and taking it out of sight of the general public. Which was the aim all along.

I don't know about this. I don't know anyone who was once a regular p2p user but then said "You know what, this isn't worth the risk. I'm going to uninstall my torrent client and start buying everything." By contrast, I'm still meeting people online who, when I bring up the subject, either:

-Download actively;-Download sometimes; or-Don't do much or any downloading of their own, but don't like what Big Content has been doing.

My prediction is more or less the opposite of yours: that Big Content will push more and more regular people towards p2p in some form due to their 'anti-piracy' measures (Spore's DRM, anyone?) and draconian laws (ACTA, anyone?). Maybe some of those people they push, however, will opt instead for permissively licensed content, supporting the indie artists instead of the industry's content. Either way, Big Content loses, which means we as a culture win.

The future will hopefully revolve around anonymisation techniques--indexing sites like this one and TPB moved to tor-space (or something like it). It is more difficult to hit an ephemeral, consistently moving target with no discrete site "owner."

I don't think that anybody out there, whether here on Ars, or even on isoHunt's own forums, has any illusions that isoHunt was innocent. They broke the law. They got caught.

Big Content is no better, and until they stop and look at why people seem to be trying to cheat them, they will continue to sink. People have been copying stuff for years and it has not been a problem. The difference today is that people actually want Big Content to fail. It isn't that they don't want to be entertained, they just don't want to be treated like criminals. They want to be able to make a copy for their friend or their neighbor. This was never an issue with cassettes and VHS tapes, and it's never been an issue with books. I'm an author, working on my first book. But I fully expect my book to be loaned out, sold secondhand, etc. I do want to get paid, but I also want people who read my book to pass it along to a friend. Because as a reader myself, when I finish a book, I pass it along. Same thing. And Big Content needs to get to where people want to buy content, share it with their friends and family, and still want to pay.

Originally posted by d_jedi:Because no reputable lawyer would take these cases to trial.Thomas could have settled, and paid a fraction of the amount she now owes. Any ethical lawyer (oxymoron?) would have recommended this course of action, given the overwhelming evidence of her guilt.

And these "overwhelming evidence" was ?There are no true evidence that a true computer science expert would take into account. There no proof that it was her behind the computer who launch the download for example!

It was like you've got someone seeing your car ram into someone, and without any other proof (absolutly no proof that you are behind the wheel, or that really your car), you are considered guilty!I don't call this "overwhelming evidence".In a criminal case, these "overwhelming evidence" are nothing but just a bunch of possible facts.

Well that if you are really impartial.But the trial lack the basic common sense : when tennbaum was condamned to an astronomical sum of money for 24 songs, an air france planes were crash, and the family was much less compensated for "one live lost" that for "one track infringment". A live is much less important than one song on kazaa...

Originally posted by reflex-croft:Its amazing how effective this global effort has been. A few years ago whenever I'd do a search on a given piece of media, in the first few hits would be a torrent or other download, and usually half the hits on the first page of the search results were some form of illegal download. Nowadays I would have to explicitly seek out a torrent, and even then they are harder and harder to find.

Does piracy still exist? Of course, and it likely always will. But these campaigns have been amazingly effective at knocking it out of the hands of the casual internet user, and taking it out of sight of the general public. Which was the aim all along.

I don't know about this. I don't know anyone who was once a regular p2p user but then said "You know what, this isn't worth the risk. I'm going to uninstall my torrent client and start buying everything." By contrast, I'm still meeting people online who, when I bring up the subject, either:

-Download actively;-Download sometimes; or-Don't do much or any downloading of their own, but don't like what Big Content has been doing.

My prediction is more or less the opposite of yours: that Big Content will push more and more regular people towards p2p in some form due to their 'anti-piracy' measures (Spore's DRM, anyone?) and draconian laws (ACTA, anyone?). Maybe some of those people they push, however, will opt instead for permissively licensed content, supporting the indie artists instead of the industry's content. Either way, Big Content loses, which means we as a culture win.

I stated that those who want to steal still are, of course. You can't change that. But what has changed is that the average person on the internet cannot steal so easily, or even know that the tools exist to do so anymore. I used to go to clients homes and find Kazaa/Gnutella/etc on their pc's. I have yet to find a client with a bittorrent client, and the older networks are generally untouched anymore. Most of them just buy their music off iTunes and are fine with that.

The media industry's tactics were twofold:

1) Get legitimate and reasonably priced alternatives out there, iTunes being the best example2) Knock offline the simple to use and easy to find pirate options, such as TPB

Those two things combined have drastically lowered piracy, at least among casual users.

Originally posted by DarkReality:I don't think that anybody out there, whether here on Ars, or even on isoHunt's own forums, has any illusions that isoHunt was innocent. They broke the law. They got caught.

Big Content is no better, and until they stop and look at why people seem to be trying to cheat them, they will continue to sink. People have been copying stuff for years and it has not been a problem. The difference today is that people actually want Big Content to fail. It isn't that they don't want to be entertained, they just don't want to be treated like criminals. They want to be able to make a copy for their friend or their neighbor. This was never an issue with cassettes and VHS tapes, and it's never been an issue with books. I'm an author, working on my first book. But I fully expect my book to be loaned out, sold secondhand, etc. I do want to get paid, but I also want people who read my book to pass it along to a friend. Because as a reader myself, when I finish a book, I pass it along. Same thing. And Big Content needs to get to where people want to buy content, share it with their friends and family, and still want to pay.

There isn't enough THIS in the world.

I used to feel a sense of ownership over my media; now, thanks to all the lawsuits, lobbying, and technological measures, I no longer do. And if I no longer own it, why pay for it?

Ironically enough, the only media I feel I really own anymore are my Steam downloads, and they're DRM'd all to hell. But the fact that I can go to a friend's house, login to my account, and download Street Fighter 4 for everyone to play speaks volumes, not to mention that Steam's DRM is non-intrusive (I still don't buy any games that bundle their own DRM on top of Steam's). I do wish I could pass along my old games after I was done with them, but other than that, Steam is how it should be done.

Big content is winning. No bout a doubt it. They are winning in the courts, they are winning in the media, they are winning among consumers. Pirate culture is successfully being marginalized and driven into the closet. They'll never win completely, or even close to completely, meanwhile there's a buttload of denial about it.

Granting a summary judgement requires that the judge interpret all the arguments in favor of the losing party, and still find that their opponents have made a winning case,

Say what? There are two criteria for summary judgement:

(1) there must be no genuine issues of material fact, and

(2) the movant must be entitled to judgment as a matter of law.

Finding in favor of the losing party would mean a trial is necessary.

To clarify both statements, the above response is correct. But it doesn't incorporate the concept what was articulated a little clumsily in the article. It should read that the court must resolve all factual inferences in favor of the non-movant.

Thus, to the extent that a material fact could be interpreted one of two ways, it will be "viewed in the light most favorable to the non-movant." If, as a result, that resolution would lead to a judgment in favor of the non-movant, there is a genuine issue of material fact, and summary judgment will be denied. The case would then move to trial.

Many cases turn on questions of motivation, which is a factual issue, or other factual determinations that rely on inference, often from circumstantial evidence. There is often little or no direct evidence of certain facts, such as motivation. Accordingly, and to the extent that a case requires the determination of a factual question that must be inferred, all underlying facts supporting (or undercutting) other necessary factual inferences will be construed in the light most favorable to the non-movant. Having done that, the further inference of fact is made on that basis. If it is a material fact that resolves in favor of the non-movant, there is a genuine issue of material fact and summary judgment is denied.

But what has changed is that the average person on the internet cannot steal so easily, or even know that the tools exist to do so anymore. I used to go to clients homes and find Kazaa/Gnutella/etc on their pc's. I have yet to find a client with a bittorrent client, and the older networks are generally untouched anymore. Most of them just buy their music off iTunes and are fine with that.

I think the reason you don't find p2p apps (etc) are because of things like iTunes, not so much the threat of prosecution.

They addressed the need, and I believe *that* is what led to the reduction.

In my experience, the whole scene has moved towards streaming and sneakernets. Most people I know either watch series and movies online streamed from various 'unofficial' sites ... or boost their local library from time to time by copying a few hundred movies from someone else's portable harddisk. It seems everyone has one of the 300-1000GB pocket drivs nowadays. So while a few of the more knowledgeable still know how to download from various sites, I honestly believe that the amount af data shared over USB/Firewire is much larger.

Originally posted by reflex-croft:Those two things combined have drastically lowered piracy, at least among casual users.

I have yet to meet the "casual users" represented in these discussions. I see attempted torrent traffic at work from people who need help pushing the power button. Kill TPB, kill Mininova, and they'll still do it. They won't even know why the site went down since these casual users don't read up on the subject.

They just want their TV shows, and all you have to do is download X application and click on a link from a search site. Most (if not all) of them have iTunes installed.

Originally posted by zimdba:Why does it seem that these guys (Fung, Tenenbaum) always seem to get the amateur lawyers. When the judge rebukes you for not even addressing the points in the complaint, it's not going to look good for your client.

Because no reputable lawyer would take these cases to trial.Thomas could have settled, and paid a fraction of the amount she now owes. Any ethical lawyer (oxymoron?) would have recommended this course of action, given the overwhelming evidence of her guilt.

Uh.... what 'overwhelming evidence'? The only evidence they had was an IP number, which as I KEEP ON TELLING PEOPLE, and apparently it goes in one ear and out the other..... IS NOT PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE! Not in the time of Wi-Fi which is easily hacked, easy spoofed broadband modems, etc.

In fact, the only 'evidence' they had against Jammie Thomas was..... not very reliable, coming from my friend who works for Comcast in their 'abuse' department.He's had cases where he has seen someone downloading something like CP, only to find that the home in question....... there are only 60 year old women there or old men, don't have a computer, and never have had a computer!

How did it appear that they were doing that? Simple: someone got the account in their name, provided their own modem, and OFF THEY WENT!

quote:

Originally posted by ruddy:Big content is winning. No bout a doubt it. They are winning in the courts, they are winning in the media, they are winning among consumers. Pirate culture is successfully being marginalized and driven into the closet. They'll never win completely, or even close to completely, meanwhile there's a buttload of denial about it.

Sorry, but no. If anything, people 'pirating' things is increasing.... it's just that these companies have realized that suing people makes their best customers turn away from them in DISGUST, knowing that it could be them if they loaned someone their CD or something like that.That makes them say "FORGET YOU!" and go and download all their music illegally in archival formats such as .rar and .zip, which NO network software or equipment can see into if they are passworded.

Originally posted by ruddy:Big content is winning. No bout a doubt it. They are winning in the courts, they are winning in the media, they are winning among consumers. Pirate culture is successfully being marginalized and driven into the closet. They'll never win completely, or even close to completely, meanwhile there's a buttload of denial about it.

Sure they are. That is why I can download any TV show, album, movie, or piece of software I want to from dozens of sites that are popping up like mushroom after an Autumn rain to replace isohunt and the Pirate Bay. It is a joke. It is never going to stop. There are literally a dozen more new sites since this year alone. Don't fool yourselves. Big Content is winning battles, bit in the long term they will never win the war.

I have to wonder if there are any stats showing if p2p is in decline, holding steady or increasing?Anyway if the big media companies are successful at closing down the majority of sites, people will just resort to sharing their media the old fashioned way of actually making copies for friends. I also suspect there are people who resort to downloading copyrighted content from p2p sites because there is no legitimate ways of purchasing new content in their own countries. The big media companies need to release new content globally all at the same time.

Here is the truth: People are going to set up torrent sites, people are going to download supposed copyrighted material. If the studios don't like it and the law has something to say about it, then they can bring up lawsuits against the defending party, lock them up, and/or fine them and shut down their site.

Then some other wiz will create a new torrent site and people will continue to download the SAME material.

The "law" doesn't make demand go away, kind of like the prohibition on drugs doesn't make drugs go away... it only makes them more valuable.

Originally posted by reflex-croft:I stated that those who want to steal still are, of course.

Starting the post with that, of all things? "Copyright is theft." See, I can do it too.

quote:

Originally posted by reflex-croft:But what has changed is that the average person on the internet cannot steal so easily, or even know that the tools exist to do so anymore.

That's funny, because I used to be one of the "average people" until this happened:One of my friends: "...oh, yeah, I downloaded [this] the other day. It's pretty cool."Me: "How is it that you go about doing that?"One of my friends: "Install this *provides link to uTorrent* and use this *provides link to Mininova*."Me: *becomes a regular BitTorrent user*

I therefore contest the assertion that it's becoming more difficult for average people.

quote:

Originally posted by reflex-croft:I used to go to clients homes and find Kazaa/Gnutella/etc on their pc's. I have yet to find a client with a bittorrent client, and the older networks are generally untouched anymore. Most of them just buy their music off iTunes and are fine with that.

They could still be downloading files via IRC, or even having their friends email them copies of their favorite songs. Or they could be using a direct download service. Or participating in a sneakernet. Or sharing via IM...

Or, yeah, they could just not be doing it. But considering that there are still lots of healthy swarms out there and you can still find just about anything on a network somewhere, I think it's a little early to be saying "Piracy is dying."

quote:

Originally posted by reflex-croft:The media industry's tactics were twofold:

1) Get legitimate and reasonably priced alternatives out there, iTunes being the best example

"Reasonably priced" is subjective. A dollar a song is considered by some to be too much, especially when pennies of that goes to the artist and the label deducts 25% for "packaging fees." Also, what have the industries been doing about non-US markets? Regional lockout is still ongoing with many of these services.

(After checking Wikipedia's page on iTunes just before posting this, they seem to do okay with regards to servicing international markets, but regional lockout is still an issue with other services.)

Also also: I run Linux. No legitimate and 'reasonably priced' iTunes for me.

quote:

Originally posted by reflex-croft:2) Knock offline the simple to use and easy to find pirate options, such as TPB

Originally posted by Eraserhead:Its pretty high risk that TPB will have to give up their logs and you'll get caught - frankly its only a matter of time before its shut down permanently.

Sure, it's wholly possible that TPB will die out at some point. But it won't really matter. During the summer it was demonstrated that it's possible to clone TPB's torrent database and create a new torrent hosting site with TPB's torrents. So if TPB dies, some other website will take its place- either a currently existing public tracker (of which there are many) or an entirely new tracker, perhaps one that capitalizes on TPB's name and reputation somehow.

Besides, even if TPB were taken offline today, its millions of peers wouldn't suddenly give up file sharing. They'd just find somewhere else to go. That was what happened with Napster, after all; shutting it down didn't nip p2p in the bud, but rather it explosively fueled its growth.

quote:

Originally posted by Eraserhead:I agree that average users are now much less likely to steal content than they were before

Copyright is theft.

Aside from that, I continue to fail to see why the 'average user' is less able to download whatever he wants nowadays. The availability of content is not an issue- just about everything is still available in some form, either on BitTorrent or a download service like Rapidshare. It is no more technically difficult to install a BitTorrent client and load up a torrent than it ever has been. No major anti-p2p laws, to my knowledge, have been passed in the last year or so, so there is no additional significant legal pressure against it (unless you cite the high-profile lawsuits like Tenenbaum as deterrents, but it could just as easily be argued that the extraordinarily high verdicts are pushing more people to pirate simply out of hatred for Big Content). In fact, since the RIAA reportedly gave up on (new) individual suits in 2008, choosing instead to focus on ISPs and websites, there may be less of a chance of getting busted.

With all this in mind, would someone like to explain exactly why the 'average user' cannot download anymore?

quote:

Originally posted by Eraserhead:especially as there is a lot of content available legally.

As it happens, this is a point I agree with. Particularly with regards to permissively licensed content, as opposed to mainstream content. If Big Content keeps pushing people to use p2p, then great- but it's even better if Big Content keeps pushing people towards independent distribution and marketing that doesn't line their pockets with money with which to prosecute more sharers and lobby for more laws.

Regarding the battle vs. the war. The first forum I was a member on was called Artists Against Piracy, it was run by the RIAA, and was meant to allow artists, record execs, and other media types discuss ways of stopping the ever-growing threat of Napster. Yeah, this was way back in the day. Anyway, some news story led me there, and this forum was open to the public, and did not require registration (the ol' "post your name and email, and a cookie is set to remember it" deal) so I got on. Needless to say they did not like me very much, and in fact closed the board when me and a few others gave them a bit of debate. But one point I made was that in pleading with them not to shut down Napster, they would be doing themselves a favor, because if you recall, Napster would only share Mp3s. I warned them that its successor would not have that restriction. I told them they should have done something like what iTunes has become, educate the public, and not open the flood gates to film and software piracy. Well, they shut down Napster. Guess what happened? Movie downloads took off in Morpheus and later Kazaa and maybe one other. If you ask me, the MPAA needs to sue the RIAA.

quote:

Originally posted by heartburnkid:Ironically enough, the only media I feel I really own anymore are my Steam downloads, and they're DRM'd all to hell. But the fact that I can go to a friend's house, login to my account, and download Street Fighter 4 for everyone to play speaks volumes, not to mention that Steam's DRM is non-intrusive (I still don't buy any games that bundle their own DRM on top of Steam's). I do wish I could pass along my old games after I was done with them, but other than that, Steam is how it should be done.

Steam hates me. Half-Life 2 and some other stuff related to it came free with my CPU/RAM/mobo combo at Newegg, and I have not gotten anything out of it. I let it download HL2 when I was on broadband. I backed it up, and when I had dialup again (I moved), the download was not done right. Valve addressed the problem, said oops, our bad, get the new version. Got the new version, wouldn't unpack the backup. Oh, I have to download it again. No can do. Got back on broadband and downloaded it, and it worked, but it had various problems, and I haven't touched it in 2 years. Well, next year I'm building a quad-core, and I'm gonna get Steam working, because you're right, Steam has pretty much a good handle on gaming. It's a lot of the things I love about the Xbox 360 setup but on PCs. Steam has a little less DRM than the Xbox though, as I can't login at my brother-in-law's house and get all my Rock Band songs. (That would just be too easy, I suppose.)

Speaking of Rock Band, I think Harmonix deserve proper credit in fighting piracy. A bunch of geeks in bands around Boston get together to make games, first a couple sketchy PS2 games involving techno music, some kind of racer/puzzle, then they make Guitar Hero. They made three of those, then sold the franchise (stupid move) and made Rock Band, adding the other three instruments. Say what you will about RB as a gamer, but the franchise has gotten people paying for music. You can't pirate RB DLC, and people who love RB are all too willing, almost sheepishly (myself included) paying $2/track, twice what Apple charges on iTunes, and you can't even take the music with you on an iPod or whatever. But people want to pay it. And I don't even mean just for their favorite songs. A lot of bands hate music games (e.g. Led Zeppelin) and a lot of them are exclusive to Harmonix's competitor, Activision Blizzard, who bought the Guitar Hero name, and couple good songs with horrible software and churn out a new GH game every month. I mean people are paying for bands like Weezer, Green Day, Electric Six, umm... All kinds of bands. I mean, I might have named YOUR favorite band, but over on iTunes, where people generally only get songs they like, RB players are more willing to settle for something that they would not have asked for, but are willing to play in the game. Can iTunes say that? (But this isn't iTunes vs. Rock Band, we all know who's sold more tracks.)

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Originally posted by 4nd:So if TPB dies, some other website will take its place- either a currently existing public tracker (of which there are many) or an entirely new tracker, perhaps one that capitalizes on TPB's name and reputation somehow.

Oh, like mininova did? (Its name was based on suprnova, one of the early torrent sites, for those who didn't know -- sounds like you do, but for the benefit of the readers.)

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Originally posted by 4nd:Besides, even if TPB were taken offline today, its millions of peers wouldn't suddenly give up file sharing. They'd just find somewhere else to go. That was what happened with Napster, after all; shutting it down didn't nip p2p in the bud, but rather it explosively fueled its growth.

My hypothesis as well. I wonder how big it will get after the torrent. I've heard theories of completely anonymous networks. Maybe one day they will learn to leave well enough alone -- at least until they can catch up.

Or they can innovate. iTunes was brilliant if you have a PC or a Mac. Sorry Linux users, you're not willing to pay for an OS, you probably wouldn't pay for music either.</sarcasm> Still TV shows are too expensive. $2/episode sounds cheap for 45 minutes of entertainment, but by the end of the season you may as well have bought the season twice over on DVD, only you don't have the pretty box. Nothing beats free, but if they can broadcast something, surely they can lure honest people away from the torrent somehow. Maybe a monthly pass or something.

They also need to consider this economy. People are out of work, losing hours, and/or getting their pay cut. They can't afford to buy as much media as they could before. p2p numbers have always been sketchy, so it's hard to see that it's not just p2p causing problems. Yet p2p gets the blame, even when other factors are involved.

My rant about Some Big Music Corp(tm) and, while I'm at it, Some Big Software Corp(tm):When I go into a shop and buy a T-shirt, I only get the one T-shirt. That's it. I can wear it or give it to someone else, or burn it for all I care. On the other hand, I can't just magic another, duplicate T-shirt out of thin air to give to someone else if I particularly like it and think they'd appreciate it to. That's perfectly natural and normal, a restriction by the laws of physics and the expected behaviour of any T-shirt I can think of (if you've got a self-replicating T-shirt, please send me a copy!).On the other hand, we copy, download and upload images, music, sound and video all the time. Anyone that's watched a Youtube video has downloaded that video from the server to the computer (hence, "buffering"). Anyone that uses flickr or hell, even looks at this web-page in anything other then lynx(/links) has downloaded a plethora of images to their computer before they are displayed. We back-up music, stick it on music players or put it on CDs to play in the car. This is perfectly natural and normal, as all we're doing is manipulating electronic data (or duplicating instructions which are then processed by various pieces of equipment, more precisely). That's how we expect, "digital media" to behave.

So why, pray-tell, are Some Big Music Corp(tm)/Some Big Software Corp(tm) trying to sell and prohibit electronic data as if it's that T-shirt I bought in the store? It's nigh-impossible to handle the two in the same way! Heaven forbid someone else LISTENS to it with me without having bought the album first, they may be considered a thief!

Care to explain the ideology behind that? Theft being defined legally as unlawful taking. Or do you go by some other definition of theft?

I'd also like to know this, considering I've got plenty of copyrighted music and software on my computer that I give to other people frequently. The Creative Commons and GPL ARE copyright licenses, after all.